Ending Up (New York Review Books Classics) by Kingsley Amis

Finishing Up is a grimly hilarious dance of demise, filled with bickering, bitching, backstabbing, consuming (of course), and idiocy of every kind. it's a e-book approximately demise humans and a couple of death England, clinging to its stories of greatness because it succumbs to terminal decay.

Everyone desires a comfy position to die, and Kingsley Amis's characters have came across it in Tuppeny-happeny Cottage, the place various septuagenarians have come jointly to determine each other out the door of existence. There's ugly Adela, whose sole ardour is her cheapness; her brother Brigadier Bernard Bastable, constantly strategizing a brand new retreat to the lavatory sooner than sallying forth to play a few particularly nasty sensible funny story; Shorty, the servant, who years in the past had a fling with the brigadier within the barracks and now organizes his day round a path of hidden bottles; George Zeyer, the celebrated professor of heritage, bedridden and helpless to articulate his still-coherent suggestions; and Marigold, who slowly yet definitely is forgetting it all.

And now it really is Christmas. little ones and grandchildren are coming to go to their in poor health elders. They don't understand what lies in shop ahead of the tale ends. None folks do.

"I believe that i've got spent part my profession with one or one other Pelican Shakespeare in my again pocket. comfort, even though, is the least vital element of the hot Pelican Shakespeare sequence. here's a chic and transparent textual content for both the research or the practice session room, notes the place you would like them and the prestigious scholarship of the final editors, Stephen Orgel and A.

A undying, terrifying story of 1 man’s obsession to create life—and the monster that grew to become his legacy.

Mary Shelley started writing Frankenstein whilst she was once purely eighteen. immediately a Gothic mystery, a passionate romance, and a cautionary story concerning the risks of technology, Frankenstein tells the tale of dedicated technology scholar Victor Frankenstein. passionate about gaining knowledge of the reason for iteration and lifestyles, and bestowing animation upon dead subject, Frankenstein assembles a man or woman from stolen physique components; yet upon bringing it to lifestyles, he recoils in horror on the creature’s hideousness. stricken by isolation and loneliness, the once-innocent creature turns to evil and unleashes a crusade of murderous revenge opposed to his writer, Dr. Frankenstein.

Frankenstein, an quick bestseller and an immense ancestor of either the horror and science-fiction genres, not just tells a terrifying tale, but additionally increases profound, nerve-racking questions about the very nature of existence and where of humankind in the cosmos: What does it suggest to be human? What tasks can we need to one another? How a ways will we pass in tampering with Nature? In our age, choked with information of organ donation, genetic engineering, and bio-terrorism, those questions are extra suitable than ever.

Charles Dickens's satirical masterpiece, The Pickwick Papers, catapulted the younger author into literary status whilst it used to be first serialized in 1836-37.

It recounts the rollicking adventures of the individuals of the Pickwick membership as they commute approximately England entering into all kinds of mischief. Laugh-out-loud humorous and ceaselessly interesting, the e-book additionally finds Dickens's burgeoning curiosity within the parliamentary process, legal professionals, the negative legislation, and the ills of debtors' prisons.

As G. okay. Chesterton famous, "Before [Dickens] wrote a unmarried genuine tale, he had one of those imaginative and prescient . .. a map jam-packed with incredible cities, thundering coaches, clamorous market-places, uproarious resorts, unusual and swaggering figures. That imaginative and prescient was once Pickwick. "

Set in a topsy-turvy international like a vacation revel, this comedy devises a romantic plot round separated twins, lost passions, and unsuitable identification. Juxtaposed to it's the satirical tale of a self-deluded steward who goals of turning into “Count Malvolio” in basic terms to obtain his comeuppance by the hands of the merrymakers he needs to suppress.

Susie Orbach, Fat is a Feminist Issue It has always appeared to me to be one of the greatest existing absurdities, that a whole community of people, differing in complexion, form, and feature, as widely as the same species can differ, should . . desire to wear precisely the same kind of dress. Sarah Stickney Ellis, Daughters of England  The remarkable similarity between Orbach’s and Ellis’s observations indicates that the wish to adapt to one predominant standard of beauty bridges nineteenth- and twentieth-century women’s experiences, and that contemporary complaints about the tyranny of slenderness have antecedents in the Victorian era.

Faces a very severe sanction indeed in a world dominated by men: the refusal of male patronage.  It is my hope that critics, by acknowledging this more complex view of the workings of power, will eventually put to rest the tiresome criticism that there exists no conspiracy to make women thin: of course there does not. Power is far too dispersed and anonymous for there to be any such organized plan; nevertheless, power relations as they stand in the twentieth century do make women suffer. Finally, in my conclusion, I draw similarities between Victorian and contemporary cultures, arguing that our own attitudes toward the body have changed remarkably little in the past century, and speculating about the kind of political work that literary and cultural criticism can accomplish in the effort to curtain anorexia nervosa as a pathology and as a paradigm of femininity.

The writer, who equates tight lacing with self-immolation and pagan sacriﬁcial rites, implies that the practice of tight lacing is not only dangerous but immoral, perhaps because tight lacing drew attention to a woman’s erotic beauty. ” This intensiﬁcation of anti-lacing rhetoric at ﬁrst suggests an escalation of the practice, but the fashion for enormous skirts during the s actually renders such a hypothesis unlikely. The sensationalizing of critics’ language suggests, instead, that opponents may have been writing against an increasing acceptance of tight lacing.